Lumber Arrives

I needed to order more wood for the bench lid, and since I was going to have to pay for shipping anyway I figured I might as well order wood for the next project, too.  This way it will have plenty of time to acclimate to my shop.

Another order from Zach at Dunham Hardwoods in Dunlap, Iowa.  Not a single check in any board.  Awesome!

I spent the first half of the day cutting stickers so that I could stack the boards properly.

I gave up on resawing for a bookmatched bench lid.  Instead I'm just going to use 5/4 stock from the same board (plus a thin filler in the middle) and breadboard ends to make sure it stays flat forever.

Before I can work on the breadboard ends I need to make the panel flat.  My planer is only 13" wide, so I had to do this by hand.  I don't think I'm doing it right, though, as it took me 4 hours.  Maybe I need to take heavier cuts.

It was at hour #2 that I realized that my bench isn't flat anymore. Ugg!

I Don't Do Math.

I figured out where my math went wrong (at the very beginning).

I thought I needed the following:
6.66 board feet of 4/4 Poplar
10 board feet of 5/4 Quartersawn White Oak
20 board feet of 4/4 Quartersawn White Oak

After doing the math again, here is what I actually needed:
5bf 4/4 Poplar
20bf 5/4 QSWO (twice as much!)
24bf 4/4 QSWO (20% more)

Here is what I ordered (adding 50% to each):
10bf 4/4 Poplar (plenty)
15bf 5/4 QSWO (not enough)
30bf 4/4 QSWO (barely enough)

And here's what I should have ordered:
7.5bf 4/4 Poplar
30bf 5/4 QSWO
36bf 4/4 QSWO

I had some leftover 5/4 QSWO from a previous project which is probably the only reason I'm not paying another shipping charge for more wood.

So I got really lucky that I was able to fit all of these parts onto the lumber I had, and this is likely the reason it took so long to place all the parts.  I think I've got less than 5% waste.  :P  Squeaky!

Assigning Parts to Boards

This is my first real attempt at considering wood grain for every element of a project.  Everything I've read about "designing with the grain" suggests that putting this effort in before you begin the project will really help bring the end result to that "fine furniture level."

Enough with the quotes.  This was a royal pain in the ass.  I thought I ordered 50% extra wood because I'm new at this sorta thing and I wanted to leave plenty of room for flaws, selection, waste, and mistakes.  From what I can tell, after working on this for the pat 4 hours, it looks like I ordered exactly the amount this project requires.  I'm not sure where my math went wrong, but it's on my list to find out so that I don't make this mistake again.  I got really lucky.

Once again, here's what I'm going to be building:

So here's my thought process.  There's probably a faster way to do this, and if anyone out there is reading this at all, and if you know a better way, please chime in.  This was tricky.   Maybe it's easier when you have a huge supply of lumber, and perhaps the reason I had so much difficulty is because I didn't have any extra to choose from, but even so, it took awhile to get to the point where I realized I was running low on stock.

1. Best Grain First.  Identify the parts of your project that will be most visible, and where decorative wood grain can be placed for the most dramatic effect.  If you went through the trouble of buying figured wood, here is your chance to make it shine.
• In my case, the 3 front panels are where I want the best figure to be displayed. 
• My wife and I looked through every board and decided on the one we liked the best.  We decided to resaw it in half to create a bookmatched panel, and glue it to a substrate to return it to the 3/4" overall thickness.
• I made a little template out of poster board to help us decide where to cut the panels.
2. Best Grain Second.  The second most important location for beautiful grain: the bench lid.  I decided to bookmatch the lid as well, which then requires glueing it to substrate material to return it to the 1" overall thickness.
• All of this resawing and veneering is going to take forever.  The alternative is to just pick a bunch of differently grained boards that sort of look similar and glue them together.  That's the easy way and I've taken that route on every lid and table top I've built so far.  This time I'm going to push myself a little harder and see what's to see.
3. Straight Legs.  I want straight grain for the legs, and I need enough wood to make them quadralinear, so that the face-grain wraps around the entire 2"x2" leg.  I'm going to be using a lock miter router bit for this.  
• I've attempted a quadralinear leg once before (without a lock miter bit) and failed miserably.
• I now own a lock miter bit and have used it successfully on the pine blanket chest.
• I've also studied up on how this is done.
4. Straight Frames.  For frame & panel construction, it's considered a best practice to use quiet / straight grain boards for your frame, if you're going to have the focus on the panel.  Since my panels are going to be wild and crazy, I set aside some straight-grained boards for the panel rails and stiles.
5. Curvy Curves.  Ideally I'd be able to cut a board where the grain pattern flows along the same curve as the arcs under my bench.  I couldn't find any boards that matched the arcs, so I picked something pretty without being too loud or distracting.

I saw Dave Jeske using blue tape to label the parts of his daughter's hope chest and I thought it was a great idea.  In the past I've scribbled, erased, crossed-out, and re-written part names on the face grain, end grain, and side grain and it never seems like I put the label in a spot where it's not going to get sawn or planed off.  By writing my part names on blue tape, I can peel the tape off and move it to another board without having to rewrite or erase anything.  This happened more than a dozen times as I attempted to figure out this mess.

I methodically went down the cut list, checking off parts as I assigned them to boards.

Keeping track of all these blue tape labels as I scattered them across a dozen or so boards required a lot of back and forth and triple checking.  Hopefully everything goes smoothly from here on out and I don't run into any hidden flaws in the wood.

Here is the end result:

The Search for a Better Lumber Mill

I’ve been really dissatisfied with the service at the lumber mill I’ve been going to since 2009. I’ve never really had a great experience there. Adequate at best. I think, perhaps, a lot of my feelings stem from the owner not being a woodworker, and it seems like he doesn’t really understand what I’m looking for in lumber for a furniture project. I’m willing to chalk it up to a personality difference and say “It’s not him, it’s me” and leave it at that. He’s an alright guy, and the prices there are good, but I want more than just good prices. I guess I’m looking for a partner that’s going to help bring my furniture projects to the next level.

So I’m about to start my next project and I don’t really want to purchase from the same mill as before. I spent an entire week researching alternatives around the area and online, reading forums and reviews of lumber mills around the country to find out where other furniture makers buy their wood.

Here are the results of my investigations:

Talarico Hardwoods near Philly has, very likely, the absolute best, rarest, old-growth, highly figured Quartersawn White Oak, period, and it's priced accordingly.

Hearne Hardwoods, also near Philly, is where a lot of fine furniture makers get their lumber as they specialize in full flitches (all the boards are from the same tree, kept in their original positions within the tree, organized, catalogued, etc etc etc.)  That, and he has a super wide selection of almost any wood you can think of.

Irion Lumber in Northern Pennsylvania specializes in the woods used in 18th century furniture.

Bell Forest Products has a widespread reputation for being an excellent online lumber seller with a very wide selection and good service, but I find their website a little confusing and I'm not in the habit of buying one board at a time.

Steve Wall Lumber Co. in North Carolina has most often the lowest prices of the 16 mills I looked at for 50% of the species I care about.  Not too shabby!

C.R. Muterspaw in Ohio has a wide selection, an excellent online reputation, they hand-select the boards for your order checking for flaws, color-matching, grain patterns, etc, and they have really good prices.

And Dunham Hardwoods out in Iowa has the best prices on Quartersawn White Oak, they hand-select the boards for your order, checking for flaws, color-matching, grain patterns, etc, and they surface plane down to near-final thickness and joint one edge at no extra charge.

So for the entryway bench & mirror project I chose to give Dunham Hardwoods a try.  Sent them an email and within a few hours Zach Dunham replied, answering my initial data gathering questions. We exchanged 3 or 4 more emails and each time he replied in a timely manner with a fully detailed response, answering every question I had.

Here are the highlights:

• his father, his brother and he own the business and have been doing it for 30 years
• they are woodworkers themselves, so they understand what woodworkers are looking for
• they throw away 10% of their inventory that is technically up to grade and acceptable for sale, but since they wouldn’t want to use it for their own projects, they don’t sell it to their customers
• they touch every board that comes in
• they hand-select boards for your order trying to match color as much as possible.
• if you order quartersawn white oak, he won’t put a board into your pile that has little to no ray flake
• if you ask, he’ll pick out the widest boards he’s got (again, at no extra charge)
• they surface plane every board down to final thickness and joint one edge for no extra charge. This is not hit-or-miss planing. It’s full final thickness planing where it just needs to be finish sanded or hit with a smoothing plane and you’re good to go. 
• You have the option of hit-or-miss planing or rough-cut lumber by walking into their retail store, but for mail orders there’s no price drop for buying rough-cut lumber because Dunham won’t be able to see the boards as well and there’s an increased chance that the customer won’t like what they see and want to return the wood.
• To date, they’ve never had a return.
• He spent 10 minutes on the phone with me going over my cut list asking me at what lengths I’d like him to cut the 10’ boards, 11’ boards, and 12’ boards across the thicknesses I needed to make sure that he didn’t cut them too short for the parts of my project, but also to try to stay under the 5’ mark to avoid the $7.50 UPS surcharge for over-long packages. Again, for no extra cost.

Here’s the amazing part… all of this is $3 more than what it would have cost me to get lower quality, rough cut, ordered-sight-unseen lumber from the mill I’ve been going to…..and that’s after shipping it right to my doorstep!

I compared Dunham Hardwoods along with 14 other lumber mills, getting quotes from all of them. It’s an amazing value, especially when you consider that you’re getting S3S lumber.

So I placed an order for 55bf and received it within 5 days.  Each bundle was carefully wrapped with the ends cushioned with extra cardboard and tape holding the cushions in place. There was no damage from shipping, and the boards look awesome!  The poplar is wider than I expected (in a good way), and clean and check-free. Nice! The Quartersawn White Oak has prettier and more dynamic grain than I’ve ever seen in person before.

Summary

• personable, family-run business
• high level of care and attention even with a small order
• careful hand selection of boards, rough length, widths to serve your woodworking project
• quick and reasonable shipping
• low costs, high quality lumber, beautiful figure, no significant flaws
• every step of the way I’ve been given the royal treatment.

I’ll be buying from Dunham Hardwoods again.